Over two decades ago, many retail businesses operated in conventional brick and mortar outlets. Sales orders were typically accounted for by manual entries into account books, or by manual entries into accounting software applications which were a developing trend at the time. The retail sector has moved into electronic commerce (e-commerce) rapidly over the years in order to survive and sustain market competition. Retailers are required to closely and systematically manage their transactions and inventory, which requires entry of sales orders against stock, on a day to day basis, into a resource management platform, for example, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
The retailers that operate in both conventional and e-commerce stores are typically required to register transaction entries into the ERP system on a day to day basis. This day to day basis transaction entry process is complicated due to the diversity of transaction sources and natures. Conventionally, transaction entry activities are executed manually, thereby forcing businesses into paying a substantial amount of labour expenses to maintain frequent transaction entries. Although purchased products vary from order to order, the process of recording and processing sales orders is repetitive. For most retailers involved in online selling, a common process includes retrieving the sales orders from sales electronic mails (emails), retrieving consumer details and purchased products information for the sales orders, entering the retrieved consumer details and purchased products information into the ERP system, and processing the sales orders in the ERP system to produce invoices. There is a need to automate these repetitive steps to save time and money spent on manual labour.
Due to differences in the operational nature and form of businesses, a complete customized system that integrates any shopping cart database with an inventory tracking database and with an accounting database is improbable. This improbability rises due to the fact that businesses can operate multiple e-commerce stores and sell different categories of products, or that a business cannot output a complete product at a point of sale owing to a variety of product combinations. Some resource management platform packages, for example, Just Ship IT, etc., allow customized solutions, for example, electronic mail (email) parsing, managing over the counter sales orders, validating addresses, preparing files for importing sales orders into accounting software applications such as QuickBooks® of Intuit, Inc., MYOB® of MYOB US, Inc., etc., parsing sales orders related with web based shopping carts such as eBay® of eBay, Inc., etc. However, such customizations are limited to specific properties of a specific operational inventory system. Furthermore, conventional ERP packages require human intervention at the point of data generation to minimize human errors on collected data, for example, consumer entered data containing discrepancies such as incorrect addresses, incorrectly chosen products, incorrectly perceived suitability of products, etc.
In order to utilize the available resource management platform packages, a complete migration to accounting systems that provide built-in customized solutions as part of the accounting systems is required. Migrating to another accounting system that has a built-in function of automatically importing sales orders requires migration of an online sales engine and creation of an entirely new website to suit the new online sales engine, which are difficult and require a lot of effort.
Hence, there is a long felt but unresolved need for a user friendly, automated, comprehensive, and scalable computer implemented method and system that collects, records, and manages sales order data of multiple sales transactions from multiple different sources in an effective manner with minimal human intervention. Moreover, there is a need for a computer implemented method and system that automates the process of obtaining and importing sales order data from sales orders into a resource management platform, for example, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Furthermore, there is a need for a computer implemented method and system that interfaces data between sales orders in an electronic communication format, provides an application user interface implemented in a cloud computing environment, and prepares an output data format required for importation into the resource management platform.